Monday, October 20, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Might Moscow Partition Crimea as a Way Out of Crisis?

Paul
Goble

Staunton, October 20 – Almost all
discussions about Crimea have talked about it as a single whole and thus
considered its future either as being entirely in the Russian Federation or
entirely in Ukraine, but in fact, there are two Crimeas, Yevgeny Ikhlov argues,
and that could be the basis for a settlement of a kind.

In an article on Vestnikcivitas.ru
over the weekend, the Moscow commentator argues that “the simplest variant” of
resolving the Crimean dispute “from the point of view of international law” is
to “formally return Crimea to Ukraine but keep it under the control of the United
Nations” until a referendum can be held (vestnikcivitas.ru/pbls/3556).

But
there is a problem with this: “In Crimea there are two subjects of national
self-determination: the Russians and the Crimean Tatar people,” and there might
even be a third if the ethnic Ukrainians living there become more active and
seek a separate status for themselves rather than simply the reintegration of
the peninsula in Ukraine.

“The
Russians,” Ikhlov points out, “as an ethnic group” form “the majority” of
Crimea’s population “like the Albanians in Kosovo,” but they have Russia where “their
right to national self-determination” has been realized while “the Crimean
Tatar people has no other place on earth for the realization of its rights.”

“Like
Palestine, Crimea is a land of two peoples, and there ought to be two state
formations, two autonomies or two cantons, if you like,” he continues. Keeping
them in one state formation, regardless of its subordination, will simply mean,
Ikhlov says, that the Russians will oppress the Crimean Tatars and deny them
their rights.

Consequently,
he suggested that there ought to be two UN-supervised referenda, one for the
larger portion of the peninsula where Russians predominate and a second in
those parts of the territory where the Crimean Tatars do. That would reflect “a
just and legal position: two peoples, two self-consciousnesses, and two acts of
self-determination.”

Such
a division would lead to the tragic division of Crimea, “like what has happened
in Crimea, in Ireland, in Kosovo, in Bosnia and in Karabakh. Two borders and
two walls,” with all the paraphernalia those involved. And it almost certainly
would be opposed at least initially by Moscow, Kyiv and the two peoples of
Crimea.

But
unfortunately, Ikhlov concludes, that is “the price of the crude violation by
Putin of the shaky ethnic and civil balance in Crimea and in Ukraine in March
2014.”